With a cold-blooded murder orchestrated by its main character within its premiere episode’s first minute, Those About to Die ain’t your daddy’s sword-and-sandal action epic. Except that, well, it kind of is. Its writer-creator, Robert Rodat, is the Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan, perhaps the greatest dad movie of them all (give or take a Shawshank Redemption). Roland Emmerich, director of the first two episodes, gave us Independence Day among many other “Sunday afternoon on TNT in a hotel room” blockbusters.
The show is largely being sold on the strength of a pivotal but minor role played by Anthony Hopkins, who achieved megastardom more than 30 years ago. Even the source material — the dubiously accurate and extraordinarily lurid “history” of Roman gladiatorial games and combat-sport spectacles by Daniel P. Mannix, the cover blurb of which is transcribed above — is the kind of thing you’d find moldering on your granddad’s bookshelf. For all its nudity and gore, the latter liberally splashed across the streets and statuaries of Rome in the CGI opening credits, Those About to Die is not in danger of crossing any kind of artistic Rubicon anytime soon.
The short version: This is the most obviously Game of Thrones–inspired show to come along since Shōgun, and it lacks half that show’s vision or restraint.
But sometimes you just wanna see sexy people in gladiator uniforms run around snogging and fighting and using old-timey accents to sound faux ancient. Well, I do, anyway. And even if there’s a lot of fat that could have been trimmed from these first two hourlong episodes, as well as a lot of dramatically inert characters who could have been spun into something more substantial, well, to paraphrase Gladiator, I was at least entertained.
I reviewed the first two episodes of Those About to Die for Vulture.
Tags: those about to die, TV, TV reviews, vulture